Pupils: Safety

Keith Vaz: To ask the Secretary of State for Education how many and what proportion of the emails sent by his Department to schools on 3 April 2014 setting out guidance on keeping children safe have not been opened by the recipient to date.

Edward Timpson: On 3 April, the Department for Education published updated statutory guidance on safeguarding, “Keeping Children Safe in Education”. On the same day, we e-mailed all head teachers a letter from the Secretary of State drawing their attention to the guidance. We will be publishing this on the website in due course.
	The letter was e-mailed to 31,660 addressees in 25,035 schools. As of 30 April, 13,285 (43.1%) recipients had opened the e-mail, and 9,402 (30.5%) recipients had clicked through to the guidance on safeguarding.
	Other records show that the guidance has been seen by a greater number of people. Between 3 and 29 April, the web page hosting the guidance received 65,729 page views. The Department also published five tweets in support of the publication. These achieved a total reach of 639,315, and the embedded links were clicked 755 times.
	The guidance will also be highlighted in the summer term 2014 schools’ e-mail and Need to Know timelines that will be sent to all schools in May. Schools can also access relevant information through social media, and messages from the Education Funding Agency and the National College for Teaching and Leadership. The Department also sends regular e-mails to all local authorities.
	Officials have also promoted the guidance through various stakeholder groups that work with the Department, including the Headteacher Reference Groups and the Education Forum; members of the latter include chairs of local safeguarding children boards, and they have written to head and teacher unions who met Ministers in January to discuss female genital mutilation and broader safeguarding issues.